Everything is going well, or at least according to plan, and there is nothing obvious that should be causing anxiety. Yet, when bedtime rolls around, you struggle to get to sleep, and you have a perpetual sense that you’re falling behind.

Falling behind? Behind what?

That’s the question I was asking myself early last year. I was on the mark to have a record year. Things had been going great, and I was able to help more people and teams and see more impact from my work this year than I ever have. By all accounts, I should have been on cloud nine. Yet, somewhere in the back of my mind, I noticed anxiety creeping into my thoughts, my planning, and the writing I am doing for my next book. At the exact moment that I should have felt peace and space I was experiencing the opposite.

That’s when I realized that I was keeping score.

This is an old habit, and one that dies hard. I was paying attention to a lot of little markers that have nothing whatsoever to do with my core work, or my effectiveness, or the impact that I’m trying to have with my clients or the people who read my books and listen to my podcasts. Instead, I was paying attention to things outside of my lane, and allowing them to pull me off-course and rob me of the joy and satisfaction that I should have been experiencing.

Here are a few of the unhealthy ways I tend to keep score. See if you can relate:

How THEY Are Scoring

When someone else gets something – a contract, an offer, an endorsement – that I wanted, it bothers me. It’s as if there is only so much of it to go around. As much as I encourage my clients to focus on their own lane, I have to admit that it’s easy for me to let my peripheral vision distract me. I’ve had to develop the discipline of reminding myself that they are not responsible for my body of work, and I am not responsible for theirs. Stay. In. Your. Lane.

I’ve seen this play out in teams when someone gets a coveted promotion, or is celebrated for a project, or gets more than their share of esteem for the amount of contribution they truly made. It pulls the team apart, and people begin to withhold because they feel as if they aren’t being treated fairly.

They aren’t.

Business isn’t fair, just like life isn’t fair. There will be things that you get that you don’t deserve, and things you deserve that go to someone else. There’s probably someone else right now keeping score on what you’re getting that they’re not. The sooner you learn to embrace the inherent unfairness of the workplace, the sooner you can simply focus on bringing your best every day and letting the chips fall where they may. I love this quote from the Bhagavad Gita, which I first heard from Steven Pressfield: “You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work.”

Are you paying too much attention to how they are scoring?

Things I Can’t Control

This is another one. I tend to track things I can’t control, and get anxious about things that I couldn’t change if I wanted to. It’s one of the curses of being a systemic thinker – I always worry about the governing dynamics, even when they are well beyond my ability to influence.

Inside of organizations, I see this play out as a general fear about market trends, or about the new company leadership (seven or eight levels above), or about the person on the team who simply doesn’t like you. There is nothing that can be done about any of these things – aside from diligently doing the work in front of you – yet they rob many people of valuable creative cycles that could be spent actually creating something meaningful.

Are you tracking the score of things you can’t control? Are there forces “out there” that are causing you to spin your wheels or worry about tomorrow?

My Own Expectations

This one is tough. There are certain expectations that I set for myself, and when I miss the mark on one of them, it bothers me. This is true even if I far exceed a dozen other expectations. There could be really good reasons why I didn’t meet my own expectations, but that doesn’t matter. I could still stew on it for weeks. Often, I don’t even realize how this is affecting me until I stop and really consider what’s causing my anxiety. Sometimes I realize that it is an errant comment I made in a talk the month before, or a bad client call, or something that no one else even noticed – let alone remembers – but me.

This is one of the reasons I start feeling like I’m “falling behind.” Behind on what? My own expectations. No one else even knows they exist.

It’s fine – great, even – to push yourself to excel. It’s necessary if you want to do work you’ll be proud of in ten years. However, you can’t allow the arbitrary scoreboard you’ve established to drag you down. It should fuel you, not kill your drive.

Are there ways in which you are setting expectations that you could never possibly live up to? Have you allowed expectation escalation to push your idea of success to an overly stressful and unreachable level?

I’m curious if I’m alone (I suspect not), or if there are arbitrary scores that you keep in your own work, on your team, or in other areas of your life that affect you.

]]>http://www.accidentalcreative.com/mindset/dangers-keeping-score/feed/03 Strategies For Reclaiming Marginhttp://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/3-strategies-reclaiming-margin/
http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/3-strategies-reclaiming-margin/#respondMon, 19 Mar 2018 18:20:48 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12525Feeling overwhelmed? Yeah, join the club. So many creative pros feel as if they are swimming upstream every day; like they go to bed at night a little farther behind than they were when they woke up that morning. Often, this is a function of a lack of margin in your life and work. On today’s show, we share three specific strategies for reclaiming your life, and instilling margin so that you can bring your best work every day.

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Today’s episode is brought to you by Skillshare. To get 2 months of access to over 18,000 classes for just 99 cents, visit Skillshare.com/creative.

]]>http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/3-strategies-reclaiming-margin/feed/0Get Momentum (with Jason and Jodi Womack)http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/get-momentum-jason-jodi-womack/
http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/get-momentum-jason-jodi-womack/#respondThu, 15 Mar 2018 12:51:36 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12523Have you ever had a goal or an ambition, but you simply couldn’t figure out how to get moving on it? Or, have you ever encountered a hurdle that you simply couldn’t jump over or go around? Today’s guests, Jason and Jodi Womack, help people gain momentum in their life and career, and on this episode they’ll share how to deal with the expectation escalation that comes with technology, how to determine the direction of your life and work, and why relationships are critical to effective productivity.

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Thanks to WeTransfer.com for sponsoring this episode. WeTransfer is the simplest way to share big files from A to B, for free. No sign-in required. Just upload, send, and get back to making whatever it is you make. Check out WeTransfer.com to send files.

]]>http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/get-momentum-jason-jodi-womack/feed/0Why Great Leaders Tell Great Storieshttp://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ht/why-great-leaders-tell-great-stories/
Mon, 12 Mar 2018 14:26:02 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12522As a leader of a creative organization, your job may be to tell your client’s story through the work of your team. Your team is in the business of positively shaping the perception a market has towards what your client is selling. You are attempting to gain the market’s trust through creative storytelling and branding. If effective storytelling is as much a part of selling your client’s image to the market then why shouldn’t it be an important tool in selling your leadership to your team?

Lisa Johnson has spent years studying the elements of effective storytelling and has become a sought-after consultant by some of the world’s largest brands. She believes that one of the best ways for leaders to show themselves to their team is through telling stories. Specifically, she says that leaders should tell stories that reveal something about themselves that the team may not have previously heard.

On this episode, we share are a few kinds of stories that Johnson recommends leaders tell. This episode is excerpted from the book Herding Tigers.

Today’s episode is sponsored by the Herding Tigers Workshop, and live event for you and leaders just like you. Check it out at HerdingTigersWorkshop.com

]]>Complete Your Conversationshttp://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/complete-your-conversations/
http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/complete-your-conversations/#respondMon, 12 Mar 2018 13:53:30 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12520An unbelievable amount of focus, time, and energy is spent in many organizations relitigating decisions that have already been made and should have been final. Not only is this a massive sinkhole for the team’s resources, it’s a drain on its emotional engagement and a drag on its sense of mission.

On this episode, I talk about the dangers of incomplete conversations and how we as leaders, collaborators, and freelancers working with clients can hone our focus by completing conversations.

Join me for the Herding Tigers Roundtable in April in Cincinnati, OH. It’s a full-day conversation about leadership and creativity with just you, me, and seven other brilliant people.

]]>http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/complete-your-conversations/feed/0Five Questions About Your Life and Careerhttp://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/five-questions-life-career/
http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/five-questions-life-career/#respondFri, 09 Mar 2018 14:42:19 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12519Are you exactly where you’d like to be in your life and career? Chances are, you probably aren’t. There are things you’d like to accomplish and places you’d like to go, but sometimes you feel stuck. On this episode, I share five (very uncommon) questions that you can ask yourself to identify areas where you might be self-limiting your progress, and to help you identify potential ways to move forward.

The questions are:
1. What are you protecting?
2. What are you running from?
3. What are you chasing?
4. What are you assuming?
5. What are you hiding?

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This episode is sponsored by RXBAR, a whole food protein bar with no B.S. Get 25% off your first order at RXbar.com/ac and use the promo code “AC”.

]]>http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/five-questions-life-career/feed/0Craft, Comparison, and Creativity (with Dave Barnes)http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/craft-comparison-creativity-dave-barnes/
http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/craft-comparison-creativity-dave-barnes/#respondMon, 05 Mar 2018 14:37:23 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12517Dave Barnes is a Nashville-based singer/songwriter and recording artist. His songs have been recorded by dozens of artists, and he earned a Grammy nomination for song of the year for God Gave Me You, as recorded by Blake Shelton. John Mayer once wrote this of Barnes’ music:

“He’s one of those rare talents that comes so complete out of the box that you can’t ask to change a thing, even if you think at first you want to. It just is – and it’s great.”

On this episode, we discuss the craft of songwriting, the intricacies of collaboration, the temptation of comparison, and how he hones his practice every day.

]]>http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/craft-comparison-creativity-dave-barnes/feed/0Create Work That Lasts (Interview for Chase Jarvis LIVE)http://www.accidentalcreative.com/creating/create-work-lasts-interview-chase-jarvis-live/
http://www.accidentalcreative.com/creating/create-work-lasts-interview-chase-jarvis-live/#respondWed, 28 Feb 2018 15:13:31 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12515A few weeks ago I had the chance to travel to LA for an interview with one of my favorite creators and entrepreneurs, Chase Jarvis. Chase is an incredible photographer, and is the co-founder of CreativeLIVE, a platform designed to help creative pros to learn new skills from the best in the business.

In this interview, we cover everything from personal habits and rituals, to how to deal with creative doubt, to how to lead creative people effectively. Enjoy!

]]>http://www.accidentalcreative.com/creating/create-work-lasts-interview-chase-jarvis-live/feed/0Four Traps Leaders Fall Into (And How To Avoid Them)http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ht/four-traps-leaders-fall-into-and-how-to-avoid-them/
Wed, 28 Feb 2018 14:46:08 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12514Leadership is hard. It’s a lonely role, you face crushing uncertainty with elevated stakes, and you’re expected to deliver not only on your own work, but also to corral the creative minds of others and parade them into the promised land. (Oh, and did I mention that it’s often thankless?)

However, leadership is also a tremendous opportunity. You get the privilege of helping others unleash their best work, and you get to have a level of influence on decisions that will often determine the success or failure of the organization.

When the pressure is on, and uncertainty is rearing its ugly head, there are traps that even the most experienced leaders fall into. When you fall into one (or more) of these traps, you put an impediment in your team’s path, and introduce dissonance into the organization.

On this episode, we share four common traps that leaders fall into when the pressure is on: deferring, blaming, bending, and hovering.

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This episode is brought to you by the Herding Tigers Workshop, a live event for you and leaders just like you that’s designed to help you be the leader that creative people need.

]]>How To Deal With A Crushing Workloadhttp://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/deal-crushing-workload/
http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/deal-crushing-workload/#respondWed, 28 Feb 2018 14:17:25 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12513Workloads and expectations are increasing. It’s not a cliché, it’s a fact. It’s the single biggest (confidential) complaint that I hear when spending time with companies. I was speaking at a conference in Florida, and in the short Q&A at the end of my talk a man stood and said “We are doing more with less. We have fewer people than ever, but our project load continues to increase. However, the quality of our work is not allowed to suffer. What should I do?”

On this episode, we share some principles for dealing with a crushing workload. What do you do when you’re overwhelmed?

]]>http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/deal-crushing-workload/feed/0Asking The Best Questions (with Jordan Harbinger)http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/asking-best-questions-jordan-harbinger/
http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/asking-best-questions-jordan-harbinger/#respondMon, 26 Feb 2018 17:53:34 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12511As a creative pro, it’s your job to advocate for your client, your company, or your audience. That means refusing to settle for less than the best, and pushing until you get the results that you’re striving for. On this episode, Jordan Harbinger, host of the Jordan Harbinger Show, shares his thoughts about how to ask questions that get quickly to the heart of the matter and how to be an advocate for the people you serve.

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Today’s episode is brought to you by Skillshare. To get 2 months of access for just 99 cents, visit Skillshare.com/creative.

]]>http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/asking-best-questions-jordan-harbinger/feed/06 Rules For Chunking Your Timehttp://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/6-rules-chunking-time/
http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/6-rules-chunking-time/#respondTue, 20 Feb 2018 20:33:45 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12507A time chunk is simply a dedicated amount of time, an hour or two if possible, to immerse yourself in the important, but not urgent work on your plate. Rather than relying on the non-time-committal nature of a task list, time chunks ensure that you will spend a certain amount of focused effort making progress each week. You know that interruptions or other distractions won’t get in the way, because you’ve built a bulwark against them.

On this episode, we share 6 simple rules for establishing (and keeping) time chunks on your calendar so that you make progress on your critical creative work.

]]>http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/6-rules-chunking-time/feed/0Make The Most Of Your Meetingshttp://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/make-the-most-of-your-meetings/
http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/make-the-most-of-your-meetings/#respondFri, 16 Feb 2018 19:06:59 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12504Meetings are necessary to a healthy team, but when you spend most of your day in meetings, it makes it challenging to accomplish any of the real work for which you’re accountable. Worse, when meetings are stacked one after the other, it sometimes means little time to think or be strategic about them. On this episode, we share five quick tips from Herding Tigers about how to make the most of your meetings.

]]>http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/make-the-most-of-your-meetings/feed/0The Questions We Avoidhttp://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/the-questions-we-avoid/
http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/the-questions-we-avoid/#respondMon, 12 Feb 2018 17:42:39 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12501In many ways, the quality of your work is defined by the questions you ask. Those who ask the best questions ultimately get closest to the heart of the situation, and in many cases ultimately win. However, you are also defined by the questions that you choose to avoid. If you run away from important questions because they’re uncomfortable to address, then you might compromise your body of work and never fully achieve your potential.

On this episode, we share three important questions that many people choose to avoid rather than ask:
What’s not working?
What am I really trying to do?
What do I suspect, but don’t want to know?

]]>http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/the-questions-we-avoid/feed/0Do What Only You Can Do (with Jen Gotch)http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/can-jen-gotch/
http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/can-jen-gotch/#respondThu, 08 Feb 2018 16:13:03 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12500When you are growing a business, it’s tempting to allow yourself to get pulled into the million little things that demand your time. However, there is something that your business needs from you that only you can do, and you’re the only one who knows what it is. On today’s episode, Jen Gotch (co-founder of Bando), shares her thoughts about social media, growing a business, leading creative teams, and how to keep yourself inspired and focused when your business is too big to be small, and too small to be big.

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Thanks to RXBAR for supporting The Accidental Creative. Get 25% off your first order at RXbar.com/ac promo code ac.

]]>http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/can-jen-gotch/feed/0Staying Inspired As A Leaderhttp://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ht/staying-inspired-as-a-leader/
Tue, 06 Feb 2018 19:06:07 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12499Here is a core truth of leadership: if you are not inspired, you cannot inspire. Take time each week to inspire yourself and to connect with the deeper stream of your motivation. On this episode, we share three simple ways to stay inspired so that you can earn your team’s trust and respect. Remember that great leaders have great rituals.

If you lead a team of people, you have the responsibility to keep your flame burning bright and hot. Yes, you can still do your job for a while without inspiration, but eventually your team will catch on to the fact that you’re not really smoking what you’re selling, and they’ll start to wonder whether their sacrifices are really worth it.

And make no mistake – your team is making sacrifices. They are spending their precious time, energy, and attention following your leadership, and if they begin to sense that your heart isn’t really in it, they’ll begin to meter their own engagement.

So, how do you keep yourself inspired as a leader? Here are a few ways that you can prove yourself to be a leader worth following.

Commune With Great Minds

How much time do you spend each week reading, absorbing inspiring stimuli, and engaging in conversations that spark your imagination? As Steven Sample, former president of the University of Southern California put it, we need to make it a practice to “commune with great minds.” We must absorb the insights and doubts of great leaders and thinkers in our industry (and beyond), and allow them to shape our own understanding of our role and responsibility to the team.

Do you make it a regular practice to read and study, then to consider how what you’ve read applies to your daily work?

Do you funnel inspiring ideas, articles, videos, and more to your team to show them what’s inspiring you, and to stoke the flame of their inspiration?

Do you engage in conversations with others who challenge you, push you to think in new ways, and share what’s inspiring their own work?

All of these practices take intentional time and effort. They don’t just “happen”.

Ensure that there is time on your calendar each week for filling your mind with the inspiring ideas of others.

Connect With The Deeper Stream

You’ve heard a million times by now about the importance of why. You must know your why. Your why should drive everything. Without a why the what doesn’t matter. Etc.

But what does that mean?

It’s not enough to simply adopt some why from your organization and make it your own. That’s not a reliable source of inspiration. There has to be something deeper that drives you, something more fundamental to who you are as a leader and as a human being.

When do you come alive?

Where do you draw battle lines in your life and work, and say “over my dead body will you cross this line?”

What matters so much to you that you’re willing to suffer, if necessary, in order to see it accomplished?

Here is a core truth of leadership: if you are not inspired, you cannot inspire.

This is the core of your “productive passion”, and it’s much more important than any lofty organizational “why”. Your team will resonate much deeper and in a more primal way when you put this productive passion on display in meetings. When they see that you truly have skin in the game, they will trust you enough to take risks.

Spend some time this week considering your core productive passion and how it animates your work.

Be A Human Being In The World

You are not a machine. You are a rhythmic being, with all of the highs, lows, joys, doubts, and hopes that come with it. If your team never sees these cycles, and you’re hiding who you are from them, then it will be difficult for them to trust you. Worse, if you don’t allow yourself to connect on a personal level with the people on your team, then it will be difficult for you to have the context necessary to stay inspired as a leader.

When was the last time you had a genuine human experience with your team? When was the last time you had a conversation about the things that are inspiring you, giving your pause, or otherwise challenging your perspective?

Are you trying to be something akin to what you think a leader should be, or are you genuinely bringing yourself to your team?

If you try to posture as something you’re not, it will begin to erode your own sense of inspiration. You will be like a child wearing their parents’ clothes. This is playing at leadership.

By connecting personally with your team, and allowing them to see your thinking, your morphing thoughts and ideas, and your emotions, you are providing them with a leader worth following, and you’re also preventing yourself from becoming the form of a leader with no substance.

However, to do this, you must first connect with those deeper themes. Spend time journaling, engaging in contemplation or meditation, or just taking a long walk several times per week. Give yourself the space you need to be able to connect dots and intuit the themes in your life and work.

Here is a core truth of leadership: if you are not inspired, you cannot inspire. Take time each week to inspire yourself and to connect with the deeper stream of your motivation. Remember that great leaders have great rituals.

]]>http://www.accidentalcreative.com/leading/keep-leadership-fire-alive/feed/0Truth, Lies, and Body Language (with Mark Bowden)http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/truth-lies-body-language-mark-bowden/
http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/truth-lies-body-language-mark-bowden/#respondMon, 05 Feb 2018 18:56:26 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12496Have you ever been in a business pitch, a conversation with a peer, or an argument and thought “I wonder what that person is really thinking?” On this episode, Mark Bowden, author of Truth and Lies: What People Are Really Thinking, will offer advice for how to apply critical thinking to how you interpret body language so that you can better discern what’s going on inside someone’s head.

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Today’s episode is brought to you by Skillshare. To get 2 months of access for just 99 cents, visit Skillshare.com/creative.

]]>http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/truth-lies-body-language-mark-bowden/feed/0Your Leadership Philosophyhttp://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ht/your-leadership-philosophy/
Wed, 31 Jan 2018 19:34:10 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12494If you control the work of your team, their capacity never scales beyond the scope of your personal involvement. Great leaders set effective rails to help their team members make good decisions in the face of uncertainty. On this episode, we share the elements of a good leadership philosophy and how to establish your own.

]]>25 Questions That Will Help You Get Unstuckhttp://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/25-questions-will-help-get-unstuck/
http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/25-questions-will-help-get-unstuck/#respondTue, 30 Jan 2018 14:39:27 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12493No matter how talented and driven you are, sooner or later you’re bound to feel stuck. When you’e at a standstill, the worst thing you can do is to keep staring at the problem and digging yourself deeper into a rut. On this episode, Todd Henry shares 25 simple, but effective questions to help you get out of your creative rut and get moving on your work.

Have you ever walked into a company’s headquarters and passed an enormous marble wall engraved with the company’s values? There it is, in all its permanence and glory, greeting employees each day and reminding them: “THIS IS WHO WE ARE!”

Except, it’s not always. It’s who they were, once. Most people walk right past that wall without even paying it a moment of notice. They’re numb to it, and it doesn’t really hold any sway over their everyday behavior. Your culture isn’t defined by a set of tenets or a plaque on the wall. It’s defined by what you do.

If you say that you value boldness but always make the most comfortable decision, then people will cease to be bold.

If you say that you value customer service, but you are always snickering and telling stories about how annoying your customers are, then you will train your culture to devalue its customers.

If you say that you value truth telling, but you get defensive every time someone attempts to offer a piece of constructive feedback, you will cultivate a reactive, closed-minded culture.

This kind of hypocrisy is demoralizing. However, with clear ground rules and a stable culture around your team, people know they have the support they need to take risks. Your team’s experience of you is its experience of the company. Period. Full stop. When cultural expectations aren’t well defined, people tend to be very conservative out of a fear of getting it wrong.

Dee Hock, founder and former CEO of Visa, once said, “Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.” However, you cannot impose a culture on a team. Great cultures are grown from the ground up. A culture mandated from on high will fit like a suit that’s three sizes too large, never quite cut to size.

Because cultures are grown, you must treat yours like a garden. Just like a good gardener, you aggressively fertilize the aspects of your team’s culture that you want in abundance and diligently prune the things you want to get rid of. This requires constant attention on your part, because if you allow a few errant behaviors to slide, you will eventually find your entire garden choked with weeds.

Prune the “Ghost Rules”

Ella was a successful manager at a very large company. I was challenging her to think in a new way about a tricky problem she was attempting to solve, but when I offered my thought, she quickly responded, “Nope—that won’t work here.”

I paused, a little stunned at her abruptness, and asked, “Why not?”

She looked at me as if collecting her thoughts, and after a few moments she replied, “Hmm. Good question.” After further dissection, we realized that Ella’s response had been hardwired into her by a previous manager, who often had strong, fear-based opinions about new ideas. “That won’t work here” was a common reaction to many of Ella’s fresh thoughts, and over time she began to adopt these opinions as hard fact.

What Ella had come up against are what I call ghost rules, or invisible limitations that people or teams place upon themselves for no good reason. Sometimes these rules become baked-in organizational assumptions about what is and isn’t possible, and the net result is that the team artificially limits the places it looks for ideas or value.

In order for your team to feel freedom to do its best work, regularly prune ghost rules from your life and your team’s culture. Following are a few examples of ghost rules I frequently see.

What Will and Won’t Work?
A manager from a large company once told me that he was instructed not to pursue a particular idea because “someone tried that back in the 1980s, and it didn’t work.” Apart from the laws of physics, a lot of things have changed in the past thirty years. It’s probably wise to revisit some of these baked-in organizational assumptions from time to time, just like Ella did, and ensure that you’re not missing potentially valuable insights.

Is your team paralyzed because of assumptions or narratives about what will and won’t work? Challenge any declarative statement by asking “Why?” If you do not receive an answer, then it’s possible that the team is operating by assumption, not fact.

Who Can and Can’t Introduce an Idea?
Some teams have invisible rules about who is allowed to contribute ideas to a project or who is allowed to offer thoughts or criticism about a decision. Although you do need to have a protocol for sharing ideas and offering critique, narrowing your scope of vision to just a handful of people can be extremely limiting. Ensure that everyone on the team understands clearly what’s expected of them and the actual process for sharing feedback or ideas, not the perceived one.

Are team members limiting their feedback or shrinking back from offering insights because they feel it’s not their place to do so? Identify and eliminate these ghost rules from your culture by replacing them—in the moment you catch them—with the principles that you want reinforce. In meetings, call on people who never share and ask them to offer their opinions. Invite new people to meetings who are always on the outside. Shake up the assumptions with actions that are rooted instead in your core principles.

What Is and Isn’t Acceptable Behavior?
Expectation escalation can quickly take over a team’s culture and turn it into a pressure cooker. When a team member decides to come in at 7 a.m. one morning, another makes it 6:45 a.m. the following morning. Then 6:30 a.m. Pretty soon, the cultural thermostat is set, and the assumed behavior is “we are a culture that expects people to arrive to work before the sun rises.” No one ever stated it explicitly, but all new hires observed the behavior and they assume “this must be the way it is around here.”

Are there behaviors on your team that are assumed to be expectations but are in fact simply a result of expectation escalation? Identify and squelch them.

The worst part about ghost rules is that some leaders actually use them to manipulate the team into achieving the results they want, regardless of the negative consequences. They might allow team members to believe certain things to be true—working weekends is expected, e-mail responses within minutes are required, challenging certain people’s ideas is off limits—in order to make their own life easier. Although people might comply with the ghost rules in order to keep their jobs, these leaders will not maintain the trust and respect of their team for long.

You want your team operating by simple, clear principles so that it can be messy and risky with the work it does. If people are wasting their mental energy just trying to comply with invisible barriers that no one has really set for them, they will feel disempowered and unable to bring their full heart and soul to the work.

Exercise: Identify any ghost rules that your team is following. These could be residual rules from a previous leader or organizational rules that you need to prune. Replace them with a counterprinciple.

]]>http://www.accidentalcreative.com/leading/ghost-rules-holding-team-back/feed/0Gain Focus With These Three Questionshttp://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/gain-focus-three-questions/
http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/gain-focus-three-questions/#respondThu, 25 Jan 2018 15:24:36 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12489If you want to accomplish much of anything, you need to focus. You have a finite amount of attention to allocate to problems that matter. However, many creative pros struggle with questions about what they should focus on, when they should focus on it, and whether the thing they’re doing is even the right thing.

On this episode, Todd Henry shares three questions you can ask each week to help you allocate your finite attention in the best places, and get more of the right things done.

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Thanks to Slack for supporting the podcast. Slack: Where work happens. Find out why at slack.com.

]]>http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/gain-focus-three-questions/feed/0How To Protect Your Creative Teamhttp://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ht/how-to-protect-your-creative-team/
Thu, 25 Jan 2018 13:29:13 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12488Your team needs to know that it will have the time and attention necessary to do the work. However, organizations are often their own worst enemy, and it can be difficult to protect your team from the onslaught of demands and pressure that can get in the way of brilliance.

On this episode, Todd Henry and riCardo Crespo discuss some specific and practical strategies for protecting your team’s time and attention.

]]>The Two Things That Creative People Need From Every Leaderhttp://www.accidentalcreative.com/leading/two-things-creative-people-need-every-leader/
http://www.accidentalcreative.com/leading/two-things-creative-people-need-every-leader/#respondWed, 24 Jan 2018 14:23:17 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12484What does it really take for teams to produce brilliant, creative work over and over?

Is it just talent?

Is it the result of having a vibrant, fun culture?

Or, maybe it’s just sheer will and hustle?

While all of those things play a part, none of them are sufficient to sustain great work over time. Even the most talented teams will burn out if their pace is unsustainable. (I call these “shooting star” organizations.) Sheer will and hustle won’t produce a great idea when you need it most. And a fun, vibrant culture can feel frivolous when deadlines are stalking you.

So what do creative teams really need most in order to produce their best work? In the course of my conversations with creative pros and leaders over the past several years, two themes consistently emerged: stability and challenge.

Creative people need stability

A commonly held myth about highly creative people is that they just want complete freedom. They don’t want to be fenced in. However, for most experienced creative pros this isn’t really true. They recognize that they need boundaries, because without them they can’t effectively channel their time and attention. As Orson Welles once famously quipped, “The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.”

However, many leaders overstep their role and try to control the work of their team. When this happens, their team is likely to push back on the overly-constrictive boundaries, which creates conflict and frustration, and probably sub-par work.

Leaders need to provide clarity about expectations, process, and strategy, then allow the creative people on their team to do what they do best. They also need to protect their team’s time and attention from the endless parade of meetings, out of date policies, and pointless requests. These things only rob their team members of the precious attention they need to solve the problems they’re actually being paid to solve.

Leaders need to provide clarity about expectations, process, and strategy, then allow the creative people on their team to do what they do best.

Creative people need challenge

Stability alone isn’t sufficient, because with too much of it highly creative people will grow bored. They also need to be given permission to take risks, to experiment, to develop their craft, and to tackle new and more challenging work. They need to know that their leader has faith in them, and that they’ll be protected if they fail.

In short, challenge is about establishing expectations, clearing the path, then getting out of the way and allowing your team to do what it does best. And, providing the resources, coaching, and support they need along the way.

The problem is that stability and challenge exist in tension with one another. As you stabilize the team’s work, you also tend to increase predictability which can lower the degree of challenge. And, as you amp up the challenge you tend to de-stabilize the environment. Managers are uniquely positioned to be able to dial in the right amount of stability and challenge for members of the team, and to ensure that they aren’t burning out or getting bored.

So, as you consider your team’s current work environment, are you providing the right level of stability? Is there a clear playing field, and have your expectations been concisely communicated? And, are team members being challenged by their work and feeling permission to take risks and grow their skills?

If you get both of these right, you’re creating an environment in which creative people can thrive.

]]>http://www.accidentalcreative.com/leading/two-things-creative-people-need-every-leader/feed/0Your Customer’s Secret Language (with Jeffrey Shaw)http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/customers-secret-language-jeffrey-shaw/
http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/customers-secret-language-jeffrey-shaw/#respondMon, 22 Jan 2018 14:44:32 +0000http://www.accidentalcreative.com/?p=12483Who is your ideal customer? If you’re a freelancer, a small business owner, or even someone designing or writing within an organization, this is a critical question. But you can’t stop by identifying that customer, you also need to understand how to communicate in a way that will resonate deeply. In other words, you need to uncover their “secret language”.

On this episode, Jeffrey Shaw shares insights from his new book Lingo about how to uncover your ideal customer’s secret language, and how it can unleash your business.

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Today’s episode is brought to you by Skillshare. To get 3 months of access for just 99 cents, visit Skillshare.com/creative99.